Compiled by Jay Fenello

Main menu

Post navigation

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.” — Glenn Greenwald, reporter

When Carol Coles-Linn’s husband, Norman Linn, signed his name on a Countrywide mortgage agreement in 2011, he was signing an agreement that industry insiders call “toxic waste.” Neither the husband nor the wife realized they were signing a fraudulent document. Not that it mattered.

Mike “Mish” Shedlock has repeatedly pointed out that we have reached “peak credit” – and there will not in our lifetimes be as much credit as we saw from 2000-2008. I noted last year: Michael Hudson is a highly-regarded economist.

A lawsuit is accusing Georgia Gwinnett College of censoring free speech. A student was allegedly forbidden from preaching in the school’s “free speech zone,” itself a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution, the lawsuit states.

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) – Jill Stein’s bid to recount votes in Pennsylvania was in trouble even before a federal judge shot it down Dec. 12. That’s because the Green Party candidate’s effort stood almost no chance of detecting potential fraud or error in the vote – there was basically nothing to recount.

This editorial has been updated to reflect news developments. In late 2014, Senate Democrats delivered to a handful of federal agencies copies of a 6,700-page classified report about the secret prison network the Central Intelligence Agency established after the Sept. 11 attacks.

TAMPA – A Hillsborough County woman is suing Bank of America, alleging abusive, deceptive and unfair debt collection practices. Jennifer McCambridge filed a lawsuit Dec. 8 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida against Bank of America NA, alleging violation of the Florida Consumer Collection Practices Act, or FCCPA, and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA.

The U.S. Department of Justice has subpoenaed a high-profile whistleblower in its criminal investigation into Wells Fargo & Co’s (WFC.N) opening of accounts without customer permission. U.S. prosecutors in San Francisco have asked Wells Fargo banker Yesenia Guitron, who lost a private lawsuit against the fourth-largest lender, to testify before a grand jury in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to a subpoena dated Dec.

JERUSALEM Israel will re-assess its ties with the United Nations following the adoption by the Security Council of a resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement building, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday.

Credit Suisse (CSGN.S) and Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) have been hit with a combined penalty of more than $12 billion over the sale of U.S. toxic debt, further hampering two of Europe’s leading investment banks as they struggle with weak earnings.

NEW YORK/FRANKFURT Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) has agreed to a $7.2 billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice over its sale and pooling of toxic mortgage securities in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

US senators have labeled “the hedge-fund model of drug pricing” employed by the likes of Turing Pharmaceuticals, formerly run by Martin Shkreli, as “predatory” and “immoral” in a newly released report on drug companies’ price hikes. The 131-page report – “Sudden Price Spikes in Off- Patent Prescription Drugs: The Monopoly Business Model that Harms Patients, Taxpayers, and the U.S.

Bank of America must face claims that fees it charged to customers whose accounts were overdrawn for more than five days actually constitute illegally high interest, a federal judge in San Diego has ruled. In a decision on Monday, U.S.

The U.S. Department of Justice has asked Credit Suisse to pay between $5 billion and $7 billion to settle a probe over its sale of toxic mortgage securities in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, a source with knowledge of the matter said, but the bank has resisted settling for that amount.

Even though the influence-peddling revealed in the documents dates back nearly 50 years, more recent reports show that the food industry has continued to influence nutrition science. Last year, an article in The New York Times revealed that Coca-Cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, had provided millions of dollars in funding to researchers who sought to play down the link between sugary drinks and obesity.

Bloomberg 12/17/2016 Tom Randall There’s a transformation happening in global energy markets that’s worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity. There have been isolated projects in the past where this happened: An especially competitive auction in the Middle East, for example, resulting in record-cheap solar costs.

NEW YORK Goldman Sachs Group has agreed to pay US$56.5 million (S$80 million) to resolve a US class action lawsuit accusing it and other banks of rigging an interest rate benchmark used in the $553 trillion derivatives market. The proposed settlement was disclosed in papers filed in…

Big banks are fighting tens of billions of dollars of potential legal costs linked to at least a dozen pending lawsuits arising from the financial crisis. A handful of banks, including Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, have asked the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision that said the regulators filed their claims on time despite a Depression-era securities law that gave them only a three-year window.

Facebook is adding a new feature wherein a group that the Washington Post calls an ‘independent third party fact checker’ will decide whether stories are real or fake, and flag ones the group decides are fake.

While anonymous CIA officials have told the media that they know for sure that Russia hacked Democratic party emails and gave them to Wikileaks, the CIA and other American intelligence agencies are refusing to brief Congress in their official capacities at this time.